BlogText 0.9.6(.1) is here. It brings a lot of fixes and some changes.

The most important change regarding backward-compatibility regards the automatically generated heading ids. From this release on they use dashes (-) instead of underscores (_). I hope this doesn’t cause too much trouble.

I’ve just released BlogText 0.9.5. It’s primarily a bug fix release. It fixes some parser problems where BlogText wasn’t interpreted correctly. The biggest visible change is the removal of all file type icons. Additionally link icons are now based on an icon font and each link type icon can be enabled or disabled individually in BlogText’s settings.

BlogText now works with PHP 5.4.0 (did not work due to an error in BlogText’s option API).

Removed all file type icons. Icons for links to external sites, attachments, and subsections in the same page remain. The icons have been replaced by a web-font though (making them scale with the font size). Additionally each icon type can now be disabled in BlogText’s settings (closes/fixes #13).

Fix: Emphasis (//) can now surround an external link (fixes #12)

BlogText no longer creates thumbnails when the original image would work just fine.

A double space in a heading no longer breaks the parser (fixes #10).

Fix/Change: If punctuation is written after a plain-text URL separated by one or more spaces, now the space will be removed only for certain punctuations. Especially, it won’t be removed anymore for opening brackets. To force BlogText to keep the spaces, simply use more than one.

This release introduces two syntax changes that were necessary to fix some bugs.

To indent some text, you now need at least two spaces. Before 0.9.4, one space was sufficient. This change was made to avoid accidental indention of content generated by other plug-ins (such as the more-link generated by WordPress itself).

List items (like *, #, or ;) now require a space between them and their text. Before 0.9.4, this code *some text would have worked. Now you need to write * some text to create a list. This change was necessary to allow bold text (**) at the beginning of a line.

Before 0.9.4, BlogText used to log to a database table called logging (with WordPress prefix, usually wp_logging). This functionality has been removed. However, as a precaution, the database table will not be deleted automatically. You need to do this yourself.

If you want to make sure you’re deleting the correct table, here’s the table’s definition (in SQL):

[Syntax Change] To add indented text to an open list, its items now need to be indented by at least two spaces; previously only one space was necessary. This change was made to avoid accidental indention of content generated by other plug-ins (such as the more-link generated by WordPress itself).

[Syntax Change] Ordered and unordered list item (e.g. *, #, *#, …) now need a space after them to be recognized. This change was introduced to work around a problem where the BlogText parser didn’t recognize the bold syntax at the beginning of a line.

[Style Change] The TOC no longer uses float: right.

Double hash code sections (##) now work, when they’re at the beginning of a line.

Fixed code blocks with syntax highlighting: No more additional empty lines between code lines (only happen when syntax highlighting was used but line numbering wasn’t).

Just a quick note: The current version of BlogText seems to be running fine with WordPress 3.4. If you still encounter problems, please let me know.

Update: There is a problem with code blocks with highlighting but without line numbers. For those, WordPress seems to insert an additional line breaks for each line (making the code block twice as long).

I’m proud to announce the release of BlogText 0.9.3. This version now supports WordPress 3.3. Other than that there were some code improvements and links to headings on the same page now work in multi post view (i.e. the view you see when you open up your blog).

As usual, you can download the new version over at wordpress.org (see Download & Installation) or use WordPress’ own update mechanism.

Note: If your WordPress post editor toolbar is blank after updating to WordPress 3.3, hit the “Reload” button in your browser while in the “Create New Post” or “Edit Post” screen. If this doesn’t work, clearing your browser cache should do the trick. (This is not a BlogText problem but rather a problem with your browser that doesn’t load the new version of a certain file.)

We’re proud to announce that we’ve released BlogText version 0.9.1.2. Version 0.9.1 brings mainly bugfixes but also some new features and changes. The highlights are:

Feature: There’s now a button in the editor called “lang lookup”. This opens a new window where you can search the list of programming languages that are available for syntax highlighting in code blocks.

Change/Feature: Adding a custom anchor id to a heading now requires the hash sign to be separated from the heading text by at least one equal sign. For example, the line == My Heading #my_heading now must be specified as == My Heading == #my_heading. This now allows for a hash sign in the heading without needing to know the HTML entity for a hash sign. Headings like == C# Overview == are now much easier to type.

Feature: The quote characters (") around attributes for {{{ ... }}} code blocks are now optional. So you now can specify a code block like this: {{{ lang=java5 class TestClass { } }}}. (Note that there are now quotes around “java5”.

Feature: The programming language can now also be specified by using the language’s file extension. You can do this, for example, with {{{ lang=.adb package AdaPackage }}} instead of {{{ lang=ada package AdaPackage }}}.

Bugfix: Certain JPEG images (encoded with Progressive DCT) can now be used. Previously they were identified as malformed JPEG images.

If an alt text is specified for an image (in WordPress’ media browser), it’s now used as title as well (if no title has been specified separately). Previously the file name was chosen instead.

Bugfix: Plain text URLs should now always be recognized. Previously, they didn’t work in lists in some cases.

The full changelog can be found here (if WordPress decides to parse the readme file correctly).

As always, head to our download page to download your copy. Or use WordPress’ update manager.

Note: Since this is the first release, we hadn’t much chance to test BlogText on different WordPress setups. It works fine here at our site though. If you find a bug or have a question, use our contact page or file a bug report.